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From Carmine Starnino, editor-in-chief:
Self-improvement is having a moment. The internet groans under the weight of instructions for how to better ourselves. But what fascinates us at The Walrus is the impulse behind the impulse. Not the how, but the why—why we’re all so hungry for schemes that promise to make us the people we think we’re supposed to be.
To help us find out, we recruited Courtney Shea—one of the sharpest and wittiest writers in Canada. Throughout 2026, she will take on the problems many of us struggle to solve: how to say no, how to fix your attention, how to stop thinking about your email. Each essay will sift through the best expert opinions available, then push past them, to probe the inadequacy that drives our need to level up.
In short, Shea will be offering advice about how to take advice—and why, sometimes, it’s perfectly OK to stay an unoptimized, imperfect, glitchy work in progress.
The series starts this month, with our collective fixation over keeping a clean house. Courtney, over to you. |
